History. Inertia.
The OGC started in the era of CORBA/COM/OLE/etc. and back then it was considered a virtue to remain completely independent of the underlying transport. So the specs tended to accrete ideas from various places and that accretion was not perfect (ha! there's an understatement, right?).
Update sequence actually mimics the Serial member of the DNS SOA record (section 3.3.13. of RFC 1035
A number of other DNS ideas were also batted around, mainly TTL.
So much for history, now for inertia. The question becomes, how to best morph from the hodgepodge that is WxS to actual web services? Can it happen inside OGC? Or does it have to happen outside? Can there be a gradual shift, or should there be a clean break?
The Geo REST community would be seen as the natural place to start this kind of a thing. However, given my recent experiences with GeoRSS and GeoJSON, I'm not sure whether it can be done by a purely volunteer group. But maybe a week in a monastery could focus enough minds to do it.
Re: Entity Tag
Author: Sean
It think it has to be an outside effort. I care about this stuff and my employer is not an OGC member.
Re: Entity Tag
Author: Homme Zwaagstra
Why indeed!
If you're using mapscript I guess you *could* use the MAP/WEB/METADATA/ows_updatesequence to set your own Etag/Last-Modified header, but then if you're scripting you'd probably have far more suitable places to get that data from anyway.
Comments
Re: Entity Tag
Author: Christopher Schmidt
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who had that thought.Re: Entity Tag
Author: Allan Doyle
History. Inertia. The OGC started in the era of CORBA/COM/OLE/etc. and back then it was considered a virtue to remain completely independent of the underlying transport. So the specs tended to accrete ideas from various places and that accretion was not perfect (ha! there's an understatement, right?). Update sequence actually mimics the Serial member of the DNS SOA record (section 3.3.13. of RFC 1035 A number of other DNS ideas were also batted around, mainly TTL. So much for history, now for inertia. The question becomes, how to best morph from the hodgepodge that is WxS to actual web services? Can it happen inside OGC? Or does it have to happen outside? Can there be a gradual shift, or should there be a clean break? The Geo REST community would be seen as the natural place to start this kind of a thing. However, given my recent experiences with GeoRSS and GeoJSON, I'm not sure whether it can be done by a purely volunteer group. But maybe a week in a monastery could focus enough minds to do it.Re: Entity Tag
Author: Sean
It think it has to be an outside effort. I care about this stuff and my employer is not an OGC member.Re: Entity Tag
Author: Homme Zwaagstra
Why indeed! If you're using mapscript I guess you *could* use the MAP/WEB/METADATA/ows_updatesequence to set your own Etag/Last-Modified header, but then if you're scripting you'd probably have far more suitable places to get that data from anyway.